Year: 2012
Director: Nicolas Lopez
Synopsis (from IMDb): In Chile, a group of travelers who are in an underground nightclub when a massive earthquake hits quickly learn that reaching the surface is just the beginning of their nightmare
My Short Review: After finishing Aftershock, a thought went through my mind: isn’t Eli Roth, after all, one of the most overrated person in the Horror industry nowadays? If you look at his credentials, apart from the first 2 hostel movies (that I really enjoyed, but maybe I should watch them again), nothing he has done has been above average, IMO: Cabin Fever, 2001 Maniacs, The Last Exorcism 1 & 2 (OK, I did like the first one), Hemlock Grove (haven’t seen the series yet but the reviews are not very good) and now Aftershock where he is executive producer and main star. It seems to me that Eli has still a lot of credit left from his first 2 movies, Cabin Fever and Hostel as well as the friends he made in the industry, such as Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez.
Back to the Review of Aftershock, it’s not that it was a very bad movie, it’s just far from being a good one either. First of all, this is a very small budget movie and it looks like one. Most of the scenes are shot in close-ups, in tight quarters or inside locations so we never have to see any disaster happening on a grand scale. And for a disaster movie, this is bad news because I could not get a feel of the danger of what was happening.
Furthermore, because the characters are looking like they are coming out of Hangover part IV, we can not really connect with them either (despite the fact we are spending more than 1/3 of Aftershock getting to know them). The gore is few and far between, there are no scares at all, it’s an emotionless movie directed with no flair that is definitively not worth the price of admission, even on VOD.
My Rating: 4/10
